Chris Amirault

Great thread. I have a question for y'all. We had what was described to us as a "Chinese New Year dessert" for dim sum yesterday: a red gelatinous dessert made from coconut milk/cream, egg, and sweet red beans. It was fantastic. Does anyone know what it was -- and does anyone have a recipe, better yet?? Thanks!

I do a similar thing: toss the sliced okra in corn flour, corn meal, white flour, that sort of thing, salt and pepper and cayenne, and then fry it in a good bit of oil to brown it and crunch it up. They're great tossed on top and mixed in for texture, as you say.

Yeah, I add thyme, too -- does anyone else? Or are we just utterly inauthentic??

Fifi makes a slew of good points (and a correction or two): Yes, of course! There are several kinds of gumbo, and they require different levels of roux darkness. But my sources tell me that the name refers somehow to a dark roux, which is to say, one that isn't pale white. As do I, usually -- but what the heck do I know? I live in RI and put sugar in my corn bread sometimes! Yes! Please do!! Absolutement on the pepper -- cayenne all the way (though chitople adds a nice base of smoke, I find), plus black and red peppers. Apologies for the misspelling. But I'm surprised to see that you don't heat the stock to add gradually to the roux. When I have added a room temp stock in the past, there's much more spattering (and roux is cajun napalm; I lost three layers of skin, down to a bone, on my finger once) and the oil tends to separate more. But if you sat at the feet of the Gumbo Goddess, I defer to you! Do tell!

Every now and then since December 2004, a good number of us have been getting together at the eGullet Recipe Cook-Off. Click here for the Cook-Off index. For our third Cook-Off, we've chosen gumbo (or gumbo ya-ya), the roux-based cajun stew. Unlike char siu bao, at which I'm still a novice, I've been making gumbo since I first taught myself to cook in college, starting with Paul Prudhomme's recipe in his first book (which I was fortunate to watch the kitchen cook on a trip to K-Paul's in 1986), and working through virtually every recipe I've found. Gumbo is an astonishingly varied dish, much like cassoulet, about which there are great arguments concerning what must or must not go into the pot: gumbo file powder (ground sassafras), crawfish, andouille sausage, okra, fish, chicken, pork, hocks.... The agreed-upon basics involve a dark roux (flour and oil paste), to which diced onions, bell peppers, and celery are added, to which a hot stock is incrementally added, to which seasonings are added, absolutely including a good batch of ground chili pepper. From there, the sky's the limit. As it turns out, I made a massive batch of gumbo last night (with sides of collards, corn bread, and rice), most of which is being frozen for the arrival of Bebe, our daughter, due March 27 or thereabouts. I was able to use some wonderful fresh Maine shrimp and excellent monkfish tails, but: in my haste I didn't fry up the okra dipped in cornmeal to sprinkle on the top, the quality of the chicken turned out to be mediocre, and the "andouille" was chicken sausage from Whole Foods (please don't revoke my eGullet membership because of this -- ). But, like sex, even when homemade gumbo isn't good, it's GOOD, so I'm game for another batch real soon! So get out your digital cameras and stew pots!

What do you think of the recipes posted at http://www.webtender.com/? ← Wow... I hadn't seen that before. I think I'm trying the Piedra Putamadre tonight (just before the Pats crush the Eaglets). That would be "Stone of the Mother-Whore", right?

hehe, I just love this line. Perhaps the best thing I've read so far on this site. Someone should start a thread about food and sex.... ← tanabutler is exactly right. Honestly, I am immediately suspicious of people who don't like oysters or that very reason.... And aidensnd is also right -- we should start a thread on food and sex. Has there never been one?

After much trial and error, we now buy our espresso beans for our Rancilio Miss Silvia machine from Alterra in Milwaukee, WI. The cost of shipping (we're in RI) prohibit small orders, so we get four pounds at a pop, which last us about two months. We keep it in the freezer, defrost it in the burr grinder, and it's better than anything we can get fresh around here. I'm sure that having our scullery maids roast it each morning would be better, but we don't have scullery maids, so....

Just thought I'd add that, if you replace that beef with lamb, this is the basic filling for kibbeh in Saudi Arabia, at least in my experience. [Homer]Mmmm..... Kibbeh.....[/Homer]

A dear friend of ours, having asked for tea at our house last week, took the filled electric kettle and, instead of placing it on the electric base, turned on the stove and placed the plastic bottom onto the burner. Poof. We are now in need of a new kettle. Speed, volume, and lack of expense are our primary goals, but if it looks spiffy in a 1950s modern kitchen, that would be swell, too. What do you use for your Lady Grey, French press, Jasmine, and Irish Breakfast?

Nope -- I have never purchased creme de menthe, so I don't have it around, and the idea, frankly, is vomit-inducing! But perhaps in the spirit of culinary adventure I should try it out. Don't hold yer breath -- but if I do, I'll let you know!

Wow! I'm so impressed with the varied results of the bao cookoff. Due to storms, my daughter's flu, and then my own, I've been out of commission much of the last two weeks. I'm glad to see that people have had so much amazing success! I wish that I could say the same... [sigh]. My char siu turned out great, but the bao, well, not as good. I used Dave's (philfly04's) recipe for dough, and it wasn't quite as ethereal as I had hoped. (If anyone is convinced that they have a fool-proof -- or perhaps idiot-proof -- bao recipe, please let me know!) We ate a few last night with dinner, and the rest went to work with me; my staff loved them, but I must admit I'm still a bit disappointed. I should also say that, this past weekend, I found a ceramic jar with some intense fermented bean paste, and that went into the filling. Man, that stuff is intensely wonderful....

We need to find out about this potato/salt theory, though. I just went through my McGees and didn't find anything about it. Does anyone have a good reference for this sort of question?

Dave, do you have a link for that recipe? Your happy results are encouraging to me!

Well, for a while I roasted the pork at 450F on two separate pans to keep the marinades apart -- but after a while I decided that my experiment was over and that Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's recipe was best. So all of them turned out like this: They are wonderful, very complex and sweet and just great. The marinade I used was 3 T dark soy 3 T light soy 1/2 c honey 1/2 t salt 3 T oyster sauce 2 T shaoxing wine 3 T hoisin 1/2 t white pepper 2 cakes preserved bean curd 1 t five-spice 1/2 t szechuan peppercorn salt OK, phew. I've been telling myself that I've got too much work to do to make the bao tonight, but, honestly, I'm a bit scared, bc my bun dough has really sucked everytime I've tried this. I'm obsessively reading the three pages of technique tips in Barbara Tropp's satisfyingly anal recipe in Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, but I'm not closer to making the damned things. I'm not the baker in the house, either, and she's out for the day. So.... I guess I'm putting bao off until tomorrow....

I got my pork shoulder/butt marinating this afternoon, and have been reading about bao dough all day long. I think I'm ready to roast the pig and get stuffin'! Here are the ingredients that I used for the two different marinades: One is very sauce-intensive (Eileen Lo's) and the other (Charmaine Solomon's) is less saucy and includes garlic and ginger. I added szechuan peppercorn (my Penzey's five spice didn't include it bc of the restrictions, but I got some new stuff recently in Boston's Chinatown) and fermented bean paste to both recipes, even though neither mentioned the szechuan peppercorn and only Lo mentioned the bean curd. I have to say, that fermented bean curd is magical stuff for me.... Here's what the two sauces looked like: Left is Lo's, right is Solomon's; you can tell by amount and color (Lo's is much darker). Finally, here's how the pork looked completely broken down and marinated: I have to say I found the breaking down of all the pork most satisfying. I think I'm going to start a thread about my butchering jones! Meanwhile, on a snow day (no school -- which I run!) tomorrow we make the bao!!

Driving home in the blizzard of ought-five yesterday, we stopped at the local Portuguese meat market, which carries the sorts of cuts that I can only find in "ethnic" shops, not in Whole Foods or the local tony grocery. I ogled a wonderful looking pork shoulder (or is it a butt? I'm mystified by this) that I needed for the char siu bao I'm making, and then ordered it. The butcher asked, "Do you want me to cut it up?" I paused. I didn't know what to say. Since there was a massive crowd there, he hurried me along ("C'mon, buddy, what'd'ya want?"), and roused from my stupor I finally said, "No, I'll break it down at home." I got home, stuck it in the fridge, and then today, while the storm was raging, I broke that shoulder down into fat back, meat, dog food, and bone. It was an astonishingly satisfying experience. I felt, as Tony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson state, a sense of the appropriateness of recognizing the import of every part of that hunk of flesh. I felt grateful to the pig who gave it to me. Really, I did! Bizarre though it may seem to some, I had a sort of butchering epiphany; I realized what that animal had contributed to my home, how its striated muscle cells, bone structure, and fat would contribute to my family's life. And the half hour that I spent -- lovingly, even delicately -- carving up that meat was positively remarkable to me. I realize that this is just this side of nuts. But, since eGullet is devoted to foisting one's own obsessions onto others in the hopes of camaraderie, I ask: does any one else harbor this butchering jones? edited to add the link to the char siu bao thread -- ca

Welcome! As someone who has been cooking for a good long while, I have several well-worn copies of basic books, including JOC, HCE, The NYT Cookbook, McCalls, Fannie Farmer, CIA's Professional Chef, the new Gourmet Cookbook, and a few others that I use less often. (John Thorne's books, starting with Simple Cooking, also are well worth your checking out, I will add, particularly if you are interested to have, say, twelve different corn cake recipes in your repertoire -- ) At this point, I've tried lots and lots of recipes in each, and have a list in my head of where to turn for the ones that work best for me. So, I use the waffle recipe in JOC, the chocolate ice cream recipe in NYT, the meat ball recipe in HCE, and so on. I bet that most eGullet regulars have the same relationship to their well-thumbed tomes. Afterburner, why don't you share with us your insights as you start cooking with these books, and give us a sense of what you think works and doesn't? I'd be much obliged to see, for example, if you find a better waffle recipe (and, I will confess, I probably wil trust your judgment more than that of Christopher Kimball and his, or should I say, "America's," Test Kitchen). Photos, of course, always are swell -- !

Michael, can you say a bit about what you, as a judge and thus as part of the on-air talent, hope this program will do and be? As an admirer of your writing both in books and here on eGullet, I'd like to know what you make about all of this at this stage. Like many eGullet folks, I've watched and enjoyed a lot of PBS shows on cooking, and their forays into reality TV have been, well, interesting. I hope for your sake that, like your writing, the show turns out to have some panache and authenticity as it lets us in on the world of chefly stardom. Of course, it could also turn out to be an embarrassment to all involved along the lines of the US Iron Chef or Rocco's Restaurant. I can't imagine you'd be involved if you thought it was going to be the latter, but I also can imagine it becoming something other than what any one person might hope. So, then, I think that your take on the show before it starts and as it progresses would be enlightening. Thanks in advance! It could be a fascnating process to watch unfold.

Wendy, how'd they taste? They look spectacular!!

Great photos -- you go! Can you post ingredients and ratios from Madame Wong?

my recipe calls for the fermented bean curd as well, I know that I can get my hands on it easily, but do I really need it? Do people have a preference of with or without? I am not sure if it was ever included in any of the versions I have ever eaten before.... ← When I first made char siu, I used a recipe that did not include the fermented bean curd and the shaoxing. When I made my second batch, I had those two ingredients, and the difference was massive. It seems strange that these little cubes of slightly stinky tofu are so central to the flavor, but it seemed really true -- for me, anyway. Ben is right: "Tout a son gout, n'est-ce pas?" And the shaoxing is far better than sherry, to my tastes-- as long as you can get decent shaoxing. Cheapo supermarket "Chinese cooking wine", on the other hand, is far worse than the sherry you probably have in your liquor cabinet. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo recommends gin as a substitute, but I tried that and -- ewww.... A tally of who uses what from my collection of Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's Chinese Kitchen and Chinese Banquet, Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook, and the warhorse of Chang and Kutscher, Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking. shaoxing: MA, CK, CB, CAC bean curd: CK, CB, ECFC Everyone uses soy; hoisin, honey, sugar or a combination; garlic and/or ginger; five spice. Most use chicken stock as a moistening agent. The one thing that every recipe I've seen says is that you should cut the pork into long 2 inch strips before marinating. That enables the marinade to seep thoroughly into the meat. I think I'm going to tinker with these recipes until I have something that tastes right. You can easily test with a frying pan and a little chunk of pork. I'll post whatever tastes best! edited to add five spice and fix a garbled sentence about shaoxing -- ca

Hi Tamiaim! I think I said that. I have that book and her Chinese Banquet Cookbook, and I find Chinese Kitchen very uneven. The bao dough that I made was decent, but her marinade was too sweet and very gummy after steaming. I'm trying to compare all of the recipes I'm using here on my desk. More in a sec!

Welcome, Marcia -- and great pix! We (or I should more honestly say, my partner Andrea) made PR's focaccia this weekend for a baby shower, two huge trays. It was excellent and the group inhaled the stuff. I'll pass along your pain a l'ancienne recommendation to the real baker in the house!

Monica, what's a dal makhani? I have some sense dal part, but makhani I don't know.